Persons project – The Kuleshov Effect

The project title that we were given for these two weeks was ‘Persons’ i decided to take a different approach by studying and drawing sections of human faces creating an ambiguous aspect to the emotions shown. After experimenting with creating a sense of ambiguity within human emotions and dehumanising the human face i decided to do some research on artists that worked with facial expressions and ambiguity when i found The Kuleshov Experiment which is something that i took an interest in straight away as it entirely fits in with the subsection of the project that was give.

The Kuleshov effect is done through a video of montage of the same image in different view points. In his experiment, Kuleshov cut an actor with shots of three different subjects: a hot plate of soup, a girl in a coffin, and a pretty woman lying in a couch. The footage of the actor was the same expressionless gaze. Yet the audience raved his performance, saying first he looked hungry, then sad, then lustful. This is something that i can relate to with the ambiguity of facial expressions within my work. The Kuleshov effect has inspired me to focus more on the ambiguity of each particular part of the human face to create an image in which the emotion is entirely ambiguous to the viewer.

The Kuleshov effect was largely successful, In a 1964 interview for the show Telescope, Alfred Hitchcock called this technique “pure cinematics – the assembly of film.” Sir Hitchcock says that if a close-up of a man smiling is cut with a shot of a woman playing with a baby, the man is portrayed as “kindly” and “sympathetic.” By the same token, if the same shot of the smiling man is cut with a girl in a bikini, the man is portrayed as “dirty.”

experimental line drawings in relation to the persons project

My take on the ‘persons’ project was to look into the emotions of a person rather than focus on the outside of a person look into the interior of them. I then started to look at ambiguity within a persons emotions and how all portraits seem to have a sense of ambiguity within the persons facial features in relation to their emotions as you will never truly know how that person is feeling.

I started to do some drawings in my sketchbook that show the ambiguity of human emotions, like the two drawings i have attached to this post; the one on the left could be happy or excited or even angry and the image on the right could hold absolutely any emotion; its all down to perception.

Following these sketches and experiments within this sketchbook i started to look into artists that dealt with emotions within their artwork the most famous and well known artist and artwork of course being Edvard Munch and The Scream. I think that my next step within this project will be to focus on showing ambiguity of human emotions within my work.

museum of a person project

For this project we were asked to create a museum based around a photograph of a person in groups. My group decided to base ours initially around a man named Bernard who was in WW1 but as the project progressed we decided to change it to base it around his daughter Vera.

We created a museum of letters and drawings sent between the father and daughter that we as a group created and wrote from imagination; our aim was to show the deterioration of their relationship when the father went to war.

We also included artefacts that we made such as old jewellery boxes to add a more homely feel to our exhibition. I think that by adding stuff like this we were able to give the museum a more personal feel and really bring the characters that we had created to life.

Once the museum was created and finished, other people were allowed in to look around the exhibition that we had created, most people seemed to understand our aims as we had managed to make our storyline quite clear by ordering the letters and drawings in a chronological order to show the change over a period of time.

I think if we had to improve one thing it would have been the drawings done by the child as we had created them in colour which seemed a bit unrealistic for what time we era we were trying to show. Overall I think that the this project went well and we as a group successfully were able to show what we were aiming to.